


Skin to Bone

by thepartyresponsible



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Hydra (Marvel), Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Torture, Imprisonment, M/M, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21561679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepartyresponsible/pseuds/thepartyresponsible
Summary: The Soldier doesn’t know where the boy came from. He hears rumors.GothamandNew YorkandHell. They call him the Winter Knight, but they do it with thin crooked smiles, like they’re laughing at a joke even they know isn’t particularly funny. The boy responds as well to Winter Knight as he responds to anything.He is, in some respects, a perfect soldier.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Jason Todd
Comments: 117
Kudos: 872





	Skin to Bone

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally posted on tumblr as a fill for an anon who sent in soundtrack fill request with the prompt: “Lovely” by Billie Eilish with Bucky Barnes/Jason Todd/Tony Stark. Bucky/Jason/Tony is definitely endgame for this verse, but there would need to be about 50k of recovery before they made it there.
> 
> Anyway, here's what happens when HYDRA happens upon a recently reanimated Jason Todd. 
> 
> The title is from "Lovely" by Bilie Eilish.

The boy fights like something gone feral. Brutal, and hungry, and not used to fighting alone. He leaves gaps in his defenses, partner-sized openings meant to deflect the hardest hits onto someone better suited to tolerating them. He fights like something that was loved once, previously protected by someone no longer present.

The Soldier throws the hardest hits at those gaps, leaves the boy on the ground, spitting blood onto concrete, dazed and bruised. He shadowboxes with the boy’s lost partner, throws punches right through the man who isn’t there anymore. They land, and land, and land, until they don’t.

The boy adapts quickly.

Soon enough, he’s fighting like he’s always been alone.

\- - -

The Soldier doesn’t know where the boy came from. He hears rumors. _Gotham_ and _New York_ and _Hell_. They call him the Winter Knight, but they do it with thin crooked smiles, like they’re laughing at a joke even they know isn’t particularly funny. They boy responds as well to Winter Knight as he responds to anything.

He is, in some respects, a perfect soldier.

He never complains, never questions orders. Never demands food or rest or water or mercy.

He will stand on watch all night in an empty room, observing the movements of shadows on the wall, and he will not move or sleep or waver.

He does not speak. He does not argue.

He will, sometimes, neglect to kill the targets he’s assigned.

His disobedience is answered with punishment. But the agents are not allowed to damage him permanently, and his body cannot tolerate the level of instruction the Soldier receives. And the boy does not complain. He does not object. He does not scream or cry or change his behavior. The handlers grow bored with him.

If the Knight were more biddable, perhaps he would take the Soldier’s place. But he has quirks. Irregularities. Flickering reassertions of a more independent mind.

Sometimes, in the middle of a mission, he will set his guns aside and go AWOL, steal away from his minders, and surface days later, sleeping on a bench in a bus station or an airport with a ticket to Gotham in his pocket and no clear intentions of using it.

He cannot explain himself. When asked, he stares blankly in front of him. He does not communicate.

He’s a robot with a heartbeat. A machine that bleeds.

HYDRA pairs the two of them together. The Soldier keeps to the mission, and the Knight follows like a dog. He’s protective. Loyal. It’s interesting. The Knight’s kill count doubles when he fights beside the Soldier. He never abandons a mission when he has a partner.

Still, he does not communicate, but there are times when he seems on the verge of it. Strange post-mission moments when they wait for pickup, and the boy will look over at him and open his mouth, move his lips like he’s approximating talking, and then, sometimes, he laughs.

It’s an eerie thing. There’s fear in his eyes when he laughs. The Soldier finds that he does not like it.

The fear, or the laughter, or the desperate way the Knight looks at him, like there’s something he needs, something he’s asking for. Something the Soldier is supposed to do.

\- - -

The boy takes a bullet for the Soldier, and it’s the worst failure of tactical thinking the Soldier has seen from him in the years they’ve worked together.

The Knight is bleeding in a motel bathroom, head tipped back against the wall, breathing on a careful pattern. The Soldier is holding a towel against the wound on his side, weighing out whether to stitch him up or wait for the medical team that is, allegedly, on its way.

The Knight has lot a great deal of blood, but he doesn’t seem concerned about it. He’s staring at himself in the mirror.

“Hm,” he hums, low and breathy. He does that sometimes, too, but rarely. The Soldier looks up at his face.

The Knight stares at him and then looks back at the mirror. After a moment, he reaches up to touch the blood smeared across his stomach.

It’s red against the starkly pale skin of his chest. His fingers catch in the blood, rise up. He stares at his hand in the mirror, works his jaw.

Slowly and carefully, he draws something on his skin. His fingers are shaking, but there’s something dreamy and reverent in his eyes.

It’s a bat, the Soldier realizes, when the Knight finishes and drops his bloody hand to his side.

It’s a stylized bat, drawn in blood across his chest.

The Knight stares and stares at his reflection, eyes focused and sharp. It’s like someone’s asked him a question that he can almost answer. Like some part of his dormant brain is flickering awake, cogs catching, something stirring in the ashes.

His jaw drops; his eyes dim. He smears the design into a swoop of red, and he laughs, flat and empty. “Ha,” he says, “ha, ha, ha.”

The Soldier shakes his head. He hates the noise. He takes one hand off the towel holding the wound closed, dips his own fingers in the Knight’s blood. He draws his own design, right over the Knight’s heart.

It’s supposed to be nothing, just something to distract the Knight, refocus him. He doesn’t mean for it to be anything, but his fingers move like they know the pattern.

Two concentric circles and then, at the center, a star.

The Knight goes quiet. He stares. He takes a long, deep breath in, and the Soldier stares at the design on his chest, transfixed by the feeling of something half-remembered. He reaches up to erase it, but the Knight knocks his hand away.

It stays. It stays until the medical team bursts through the door and then, when the Soldier looks again, he finds the Knight’s wiped it clean.

Like something secret. Like something from the Soldier that he’s keeping for himself.

\- - -

A woman steals the Knight during a botched mission in Prague. The Soldier realizes after she appears that the entire mission was a set-up, the League of Assassins dabbling in HYDRA business.

“Jason,” she says, voice sharp.

The Knight shifts beside the Soldier. His head lifts; his shoulders slide back. He doesn’t speak, but he orients toward her like a dog finally sighting its master. The Soldier knows, in that moment, that HYDRA has lost its Knight.

“Jason,” she repeats. “Come here.”

The Knight goes. Without question or hesitation. He slips away from the Solider and HYDRA in the span of a breath and a few words.

The Soldier is surrounded by League assassins. There will be an ugly fallout if they kill him, but the woman draws her gun, aims it between his eyes, and does not seem concerned about the political ramifications of pitching the League and HYDRA into war.

The Knight moves up beside her. His eyes go to the Soldier and then to the gun. In a smooth, unhurried motion, he reaches over, takes the gun, ejects the magazine, clears the round from the chamber, and hands it back to her as a piece of harmless metal.

The woman stares at him. “Jason,” she says, “don’t you know what he made you into?”

The Knight looks over at her. His face is attentive but empty. It’s the same way he’s looked at the Soldier and his handlers for years. Stuck in a permanent state of _ready to comply_.

The woman sighs and goes for a knife, but the Knight reaches over, closes his hand gently around her wrist.

He does not speak. The Knight never voices any complaints, never shows any preferences. He’s drawn the bat a dozen times over, on his chest, on his forearm, in the dust of a handful of a safe houses, but he’s never drawn anything else. He does not communicate. There’s nothing in his mind.

But as the Soldier watches, the Knight shakes his head. A clear denial. A request.

 _No_ , he says, and the Soldier wants to speak, wants to tell her how important this is, how critical a thing she’s wandered into. Years and years, and the Knight’s said nothing. The first time he communicates at all, it’s to save the Soldier’s life.

The woman doesn’t understand, but she sheathes the knife anyway. “Fine,” she says. “You can do it yourself when you’re better.”

\- - -

The Knight is kept by the League for some time. The Soldier cannot track the length of it; he’s put in cryo and wiped. When they wake him up, it’s because the Knight has returned. He’s wrecking his way through a HYDRA facility. He’s slaughtered dozens. He’s out of control.

The Soldier contains him. It’s harder than it has any right to be. The Knight’s been woken up. All that machine-like calm has been washed right out of him, and he has so much rage that it makes him wild. When the Soldier finally subdues him, he doesn’t expect the Knight to survive it.

And he wouldn’t have, if HYDRA had left him in his natural state.

“The enhanced healing,” one of the doctors says. “If he survives injection. If the serum works. It would save him, yes. But after the last experiments–”

“He’s no use to us like this,” Pierce says. “Try it. If he turns out like the others, put him in cryo.”

The Soldier remembers the others. He thinks, if the Knight becomes like them, there will be no stopping him. If the Knight wakes up like them, the Soldier expects this whole facility will burn.

\- - -

The Knight does not wake up like the others. When he blinks awake in his containment cell, he studies himself for a long moment and then curls up into a tight ball and does not move.

They send in the Soldier after three hours. He’s wearing body armor. He has five knives and two guns and his gloves are stitched with heavy weights along the knuckles.

It won’t be enough if the Knight feels like fighting.

When the Soldier nudges him with his boot, the Knight rolls over onto his back to stare up at him. There’s something significant in his eyes. The Soldier doesn’t know what it means.

“Sorry,” the Knight tells him, as he slowly sits up. “Guess it was a pretty shitty rescue mission. Do you even remember me?”

He won’t. Not for much longer. Not if HYDRA doesn’t see some value in maintaining their relationship, such as it is.

The Soldier crouches down, looms over him. The Knight doesn’t flinch back. He just watches him, quiet and attentive. _Ready to comply_.

“We do important work,” the Soldier tells him. “We’re shaping history.”

The Knight smiles. He has a beautiful face. He’s always had a beautiful face, but it was the blank, impersonal beauty of a statue. It’s different, now that the Knight looks like something warm, something alive. Something worth touching.

The face will be useful, the Soldier knows, but he wishes, fervently and inexplicably, that the Knight were ugly instead. There’s a certain amount of protection in being an ugly, forgettable thing, and the Soldier wants to protect him, to whatever degree he can.

“I’m not doing their bullshit dirty work,” the Knight says. “Dying’s better. And I’m kind of uniquely positioned to make that call.”

The Soldier grabs his face, tightens his fingers around his jaw. The Knight doesn’t fight, doesn’t flinch. He watches him. Waits for what’s coming. Maybe he hasn’t changed so much after all.

“You won’t have a choice,” the Soldier tells him. “It’s easier if you don’t fight.”

The Knight laughs, and it’s nothing like the way he used to laugh, but it makes the Soldier uneasy all the same.

“I’ve never done a single easy thing in my whole fucking life,” he says.

\- - -

The Winter Soldier training protocols do not work on the Knight. He doesn’t respond to negative reinforcement. He’s unruly and headstrong and defiant. They take him to the chair, over and over again, but the rebelliousness must run marrow-deep. He’s quiet and compliant for a while, and then, suddenly, he’s spitting rage all over again.

He screams now. He’s never silent. The Soldier wishes the woman had never taken him away. He suffered less, before her. He was never any kind of entertaining before she put his personality back in him.

There are people who are fond of him now. They view him as a project.

The Soldier asks to be returned to cryo. “I am losing objectivity,” he reports.

“Soon enough,” Rumlow tells him. There’s blood under his fingernails. He’s sharp-toothed and shark-like, can’t keep the smile off his face. The Soldier, unordered, calculates ways to kill him. 

“You have another mission,” Piece tells him.

“We’re letting you take the kid,” Rumlow says.

The Knight is not a boy anymore. It’s been almost a decade since he was first brought to HYDRA. He’s a man now. It doesn’t indicate anything positive that Rumlow insists on thinking of him as something vulnerable and small. The familiarity is worrisome.

“Ready to comply,” the Soldier says. His teeth catch against each other like they were expecting resistance; his jaw aches with the mad, trackless desire to bite and burrow and rip.

\- - -

HYDRA discovers that at least one old behavioral pattern holds true. The Knight will not compromise a mission if the Soldier is present. He will not endanger the Soldier, although his kill count drops to almost zero. That, of course, is not entirely the Knight’s fault.

They don’t arm him. They send him on missions without weapons, to play shadow or decoy or distraction.

“The Knight was not properly equipped,” the Soldier reports, again and again. “He is not able to defend himself or assist with mission objectives.”

“If he wants weapons,” Piece tells him, “he can ask for them.”

Rumlow laughs, ugly and amused. The Soldier’s fingers twist as his side. It takes so little pressure to pull eyes from sockets.

“I need to be returned to cryo,” the Soldier says. “Things are crowded. In my head.”

“Alright,” Pierce says. His eyes go to the doctor over the Soldier’s shoulder. “Wipe him.”

\- - -

He sees the Knight infrequently and then not at all. He overhears reports that the Knight remains unpredictable in the field. And then he hears nothing.

Pierce ages. Rumlow mellows, all that cruelty going quiet and rancid and hidden.

He does not see the Knight. He’s in cryo, or he’s dead.

When the Soldier remembers him, he hopes that he’s dead.

\- - -

When he’s sent to kill Captain America, the Knight is sent with him. The Soldier does not know him at first, but memories begin to stir during the mission briefing and then surface exponentially during transport. He stares at the Knight’s face.

The Knight’s wearing a mask like the Soldier’s, a near-exact replica in a shade of blood red. He seems docile and serious, not at all inclined toward disobedience. He blinks at the Soldier calmly, follows the pointless orders the Soldier gives him to test his responsiveness. He does not object or yell or respond with unnecessary volatility.

The Soldier wonders what they did to him. He wonders what it was that finally worked.

“The Captain rarely fights alone,” the Soldier tells him. “This will be difficult.”

The Knight regards him impassively. “We aren’t fighting alone, either.”

The first lesson the Soldier taught him was that he was always fighting alone.

But it’s been years. And they’ve both been to the chair more times than either one of them can remember. The Soldier cannot blame him for forgetting. And maybe he was trained for partnered missions only. Maybe HYDRA still doesn’t trust him.

None of the other agents are looking at them. They are an unsettling pair.

The Soldier reaches over without looking, keeps his eyes on his weapons while he draws a quick design on the man’s open palm.

A bat. Stylized, wings a series of sharp angles.

The Knight closes his hand.

The Soldier goes to withdraw, feeling strange, feeling like something’s gone wrong in his chest, and then the Knight grabs his hand, flips it over, draws on his palm.

Two concentric circles and a star in the middle.

It doesn’t mean anything to the Soldier. He doesn’t know why his signal is being answered this way. But the Knight still knows his bat. Whatever he’s lost, that much remains.

\- - -

Captain America has the symbol on his shield. Two concentric rings and a star. Maybe all the Knight meant was that the Soldier needed to focus on the mission.

But that can’t be right.

That can’t be right, because, as soon as the Knight joins him on the bridge, he abandons the mission entirely.

He’s yelling something, but his mask muffles it. The Captain throws his shield, catches the Knight in the chest, and he’s down on the ground, scrambling at his mask instead of trying to regroup. His guns are lying on the pavement. The Falcon catches the Soldier in the back before he can provide cover.

“ _Stop_ ,” the Knight says. His mask drops to the ground, and his voice carries over the sound of panicked civilians and the HYDRA agents firing from above. “Stop!”

The Soldier turns toward him, eyes narrowed, scanning his face for indications of what’s gone wrong. He hesitates.

The Knight grabs one of his guns off the ground and shoots the Soldier directly in the chest.

He’s wearing body armor, but the caliber of the bullet still has him on his back.

“It’s Barnes,” the Knight’s yelling. “Take his mask off! It’s _Barnes_.”

The Soldier pushes himself up on his elbows. The Captain’s shield catches him in the face, nearly breaks his jaw. The mask clatters to the ground.

“ _Bucky_ ,” the Captain says.

The Soldier climbs to his feet. His ribs are bruised. The Widow and the Falcon are moving in, flanking them. The Knight’s aiming at him again, center mass, right for the thickest part of the body armor.

The Soldier should go for his own guns, but he’s thrown, can’t track the thread of the mission.

Two concentric circles and a star in the center. The Knight, shooting him in the chest.

He owes the Knight some kind of debt, he thinks. He doesn’t understand the parameters of it. He doesn’t know if letting the Captain kill him will settle what he owes.

“Who the _hell_ ,” he says, “is Bucky?”

“You are, Goddamn it,” the Knight yells. “ _You_ are!”

Above them, on the bridge, the HYDRA agents shift their focus. The Captain throws his shield up, but he’s poorly positioned to block the bullets. They aren’t aiming at him.

The Knight’s silent, hits his knees without a sound. “ _Fuck_ ,” he says, a second later. There’s blood blooming up through the thinner layers of his uniform. They don’t armor him like they armor the Soldier.

The bat, the circles and the star. The bullet he took for the Soldier before they gave him the serum. The gun he took out of that woman’s hand.

The desperate, panicked way he’d said it. _Take off his mask! It’s Barnes_.

All this time, all that training, and that’s the only time the Soldier’s ever heard him beg for anything.

The Soldier’s on his feet a second later. The Captain braces when he draws his guns. But his shield, again, is useless.

The HYDRA agents drop one by one, dead before they knew to seek cover.

“Shit, _soldat_ ,” the Knight says, when the Soldier gets to him. He’s smiling, and he’s pale, and he curls into the Soldier like he’s a source of comfort. “I always knew you were a sweetheart.”

**Author's Note:**

> For fic updates and more unusual AUs, follow me on [tumblr](https://thepartyresponsible.tumblr.com/).


End file.
